The short story that I am going to discuss in this blog post today is called "The Utterly Perfect Murder" by Ray Bradbury, which shows how twisted one man became just because of a grudge that he was holding against his child hood friend. Just to give a brief summary of this story before I get into everything else, this story is about Doug Spaulding who has been holding a grudge since he was 12 against Ralph Underhill. Ralph was nothing but cruel towards Doug when he was young and he never seemed to want to support a friendship of any kind. Doug later on, when he is 48, decides to kill Ralph Underhill for all of the things that he has done wrong towards him which leads him to go cross country by train to do so.
Now in this short story I noticed a lot of indirect characterization, which seemed to show up in sentences that he said throughout the story that would pretty much classify him as a slightly twisted maniac.
Also there were several sentences in the story that pointed to Ralph dwelling on the past way more than the average person, but I guess this can be seen already considering that he has had a grudge against Ralph for 38 years... So now I believe I will move onto one last thought which is about the themes that I see in this story. The first theme that I saw in this story was revenge, which was represented by Doug having to seek out vengeance due to the hate that he had for Doug Underhill which was caused by many mean acts acted upon him.
The second was Obsession, which happened throughout the story because the thought of murdering Doug Underhill seemed to be his primary goal.
And the third and final theme was Abusive Relationship; this can be seen at the beginning of the story where Doug recalls many of the abusive things that Ralph did to him.
So that is my thoughts on “The Utterly Perfect Murder” by Ray Bradbury and I hope everyone enjoys this blog post.
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